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Retracing a Ride to a Fatal Duel on July 11, 1804

Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesDavid O. Stewart in front of a bust of Alexander Hamilton near the site of his fatal duel on July, 11, 1804 in Weehawken, N.J.

The question was, have you ever taken a murderer across the Hudson?

“Not that I know of,” said Capt. Tim Byam, at the wheel of a New York Waterway ferry bound for Weehawken, N.J.

At that, the man in the blue blazer standing behind Captain Byam piped up: “He was a killer, but was he a murderer? The other guy had a gun, too.”

It was not a non sequitur. The “he” was Aaron Burr, the vice president under Thomas Jefferson. The “other guy” was Alexander Hamilton, the former secretary of the treasury.

And the man in the blazer the other morning was David O. Stewart, a lawyer-turned-historian who was retracing Burr’s trip to Weehawken, a trip Mr. Stewart said Burr never should have taken. It led to the infamous duel that left Hamilton dying — and Burr’s reputation in tatters.

How different it was 207 years ago Monday, when Burr and Hamilton faced off. Burr went to Weehawken in a smallish rowboat with several oarsmen paddling, not Captain Byam’s 96-foot-long ferry with engines grinding out 1,100 horsepower. Burr’s boat took its time — maybe more than an hour, Mr. Stewart said. Captain Byam made the trip in less than 10 minutes.

Burr could have been splashed in the open boat, or broken a sweat in the humid air. Not Mr. Stewart, standing in the captain’s cabin with an air-conditioner set to 64 degrees.

And then there was the weather. “It was a bright sunny day,” Mr. Stewart said. This day was foggy, and getting worse. Captain Byam turned on the windshield wipers.

“I’ve always sort of been a Hamilton guy,” Mr. Stewart said. “He was the immigrant who came up from nothing. I found that inspiring.”

The book follows Burr’s descent from aristocrat to political pariah to land-grabbing adventurer. It describes Burr as a vice president with too little to do who spent a little too much time with a general who was on the take from Spain.

Worse, it tells how Burr plotted an insurrection in New Orleans. Of course, things did not work out that way: Burr was arrested leading a ragtag flotilla in Mississippi.

“But you can’t not start with the duel,” Mr. Stewart said, “because it was a critical element in the marginalization of Aaron Burr — his political marginalization.”

So it was off to Weehawken on the 11:10.

“Weehawken was a slaughterhouse” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Mr. Stewart said.

“A couple dozen duels were fought there,” he said. “The cops couldn’t get you. You’d arrive, and you’d go halfway up this little shelf of land that’s gone. You couldn’t get to the shelf from above.”

Neither could the police, he said, and the boatmen who rowed duelers there and back from Manhattan saw no evil and heard no evil. Gunshots? What gunshots? “Burr’s boatman was called at the trial,” Mr. Stewart said. “He didn’t remember a thing.”

Lauren Sherman, the chairwoman of the Weehawken Historical Commission, drove Mr. Stewart to the monument to the duel, topped by a statue of Hamilton that overlooks new town houses and apartments. She said it was not on the actual site of the duel, which she said was probably close to where exhaust vents for the Lincoln Tunnel have stood for years.

Beside the base of the monument is a boulder on which Hamilton rested his head after being shot, or so legend has it. “I think it has all the credibility of Plymouth Rock,” Mr. Stewart said.

He is lawyer who represented Walter L. Nixon Jr., a federal judge, in an impeachment proceeding in 1989. “It’s sort of an impeachment name,” Mr. Stewart said. “You sort of feel like you’re on the downhill side looking up when you start off with a client named Nixon.” He lost the case: The Senate removed Judge Nixon, who had been the chief district judge in the Southern District of Mississippi.

Mr. Stewart said he did some “volunteer assistance” for the defense before the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.

Of course, the statue is on Hamilton Avenue.

On the ferry ride back to Manhattan, Captain Byam was talking about the names of the vessels in New York Waterway’s fleet. Burr would not be happy, for somehow he has been left out. One boat is named for Hamilton, another for Thomas Jefferson.

As before, the man in the blazer piped up. “Burr hated Jefferson more than he hated Hamilton; he just wasn’t able to get him to a duel,” Mr. Stewart said. “Jefferson was not a dueling man.”

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